Suggested teaching approaches

In a world that is both rapidly urbanising and globalising, it is widely acknowledged that it is crucial to facilitate urban education that is cross-, inter or trans-disciplinary; based on global but also on local knowledge and engaged with live projects or taught through active learning approaches defined as inquiry based, practice-oriented or laboratorial that facilitate overcoming traditional barriers: the Institutional and discipline-based contexts.

In the last decades, two trends have reinforced, to some extent, the local and regional engagement of universities. The first is a broad societal pressure on universities to become more “engaged” with society, associated with new incentive schemes that encouraged universities to develop more links with partners in their home city and region. Second, a growing number of universities have adopted project-based and/or problem-based learning methods, in which students learn by working on real-life problems. (vanWiden, URBACT Programme,2001)